Jeff Bezos & Hillary Clinton, together at last for Kindle announcement next week

Who would have ever guessed we’d see these two people on stage together?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will announce the global launch of the “Kindle Mobile Learning Initiative” on June 20 in Washington, D.C., the U.S. State Department said today.

This initiative “will create a global e-reader program that introduces aspects of U.S. society and culture directly to young people, students, and international audiences in new ways and expands English language learning opportunities worldwide,” according to the State Department.

Earlier this week, we outlined why the U.S. State Department picked Amazon’s Kindle over other tablets and e-readers, including Apple’s iPad and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, among others. The State Department attributed their pick to the Kindle’s text-to-speech requirement, long-lasting battery life and ability to access free Wi-Fi worldwide, among other key factors like portability and durability.

The five-year contract is worth $16.5M, with an initial Kindle order of 2,500 from the government, but it ultimately has the potential to put “tens of thousands of Kindle electronic readers in educational centers around the world,” as previously reported.

Molly Brown comes from an arts and culture background, including stints at Billboard Magazine and Kirkus Reviews. An avid blogger on all-things culture, she covers a wide range of fun, geeky topics on GeekWire's Geek Life beat. Follow her @evilmolly and reach her at molly@geekwire.com.

Comments

findbooks

EBooks and Kindles are money makers because they’re convenient. We like to shop online, read the reviews and download a good book – quick and easy, right? Except, we were fooled. Amazon’s top reviewers aren’t ordinary consumers like you and me. Amazon’s rating system is playing consumers for fools. “Any hack can now write a lot of blogs and review a lot of books in order to manipulate book sales. Unethical authors and their handlers create fake accounts by the dozens, write reviews for books by the hundreds, without reading them and gain a reputation as a reviewer. These tech savvy wannabes learned that blasting a competing author with negative 1 star reviews and down voting good comments would quickly slow down sales for the seller targeted. On the other hand, loading up stars and voting up good reviews as “helpful” will steer consumers to a book chosen for “help.” Amazon claims their algorithm stops campaign voting, but that’s only because Amazon isn’t yet being negatively impacted by the manipulation of its rating system. Look to the top reviewers slinging insults to locate a den of a corruption enabled by Amazon.”

Could the Department of Justice help Jeff Bezos clean up his own business or doesn’t paying to retrieve NASA rocket engines off the ocean floor buy that kind of help?

http://twitter.com/leicaman leicaman

So, the government is going with the monopolist, the one trying to destroy competition by underpricing books to the point they lost money. The company that rips off authors for downloading fees when competitors do it for free. And the markup is well over a thousand percent.

Bezos, the libertarian, belongs to that elite group of business people who believe that oppression should not be done by governments, but by the private sector. And he’s doing a bang-up job there. Hillary, you are being used.

Buggy

Yes, Amazon is shutting down competitors by underpricing books and reeling in Kindle sales off the backs of low prices and “FREE” eBooks. How does Amazon get so many artists to offer their eBooks for free? By promising to promote the publication to customers, which it does. Then Jeff turns his back while publishers and competing authors rip into each other’s products as they vie for the “top rating.” Independent authors are naively turning over their novels for free on good faith that it can compete fairly in a free market…Little do they realize that professional reviewers will be funneling customers away from their “self-pubbed” work. Sure, those indie authors may dribble out an income if they write several books and don’t aggravate the book mafia. Meanwhile, Jeff puts the big publishing houses out of business in much the same way Walmart shut down all the Mom & Pop businesses in America. Once he corners the market, do you think Amazon will have to raise book prices???